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Have you ever thought of the impact of your trips on the environment? Well, it appears that their impact is worse than what you might think.

Let’s take them one by one:

Duration – the shorter (#days) and farther (#km), the worse it is.

Take the city breaks that are so “in” right now in Europe – taking the plane for 2 hrs. each way for only one weekend will make you spend all the CO2 emissions you’re supposed to release into the air in a year!

So for short trips, you should first think of taking the train or doing car sharing. Instead, if you want to take the plane, you should take at least 2 – 3 weeks of holidays.

Transportation

As said above, choosing the transportation depends on the duration of your holidays. So if you don’t have a lot of time, choose a destination nearby, for which you can take the train or do car sharing. You can also take the bus, but you will release more emissions into the air.

!! What doesn’t enter in these calculations though is how the energy is produced, for trains, for example. Right now, most of them are electric. But if we compare a train trip in France with a train trip in Germany, the one in France will be greener, because they use nuclear electricity compared to coal electricity in Germany. !!

Accommodation

The accommodation also depends on the duration of your trip – we recommend Airbnb or Couchsurfing for shorter trips. Even though hosts propose bed sheets and towels, in order to reduce your holiday’s CO2 footprint, we definitely recommend you bring your own sleeping bag and towel (if possible, of course), because if you stay only a night or two the host needs to clean everything, which they wouldn’t have to do normally.

For longer trips, there are some great collaborative solutions as well: Home Exchange, House Swap, etc.

You can definitely book a holiday resort too, but the problem is that these are built especially for tourists, and sometimes they destroy natural environments just so that you can be “closer to nature”.

Food & drinks

Wherever you are, try the local specialties! If you go to Dominican Republic, have a local breakfast, and not a typical European one for which the ingredients were flown in!

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